Monday, February 28, 2011

IndieInk Writing Challenge: Circles

Today is brought to you by the IndieInk Writing Challenge (IndieInk.org), in which members of the IndieInk Writers Collective challenge each other to post on their blogs on a given subject. My challenge was issued by Miss Ash (who writes here), who asks "Write a bookended piece. (Where you start out and end the post with the same general thought. A circle, so to speak.)". The challenge I issued will be answered here. My piece, "Circles", follows:

The thing about circles is, you always wind up the same place that you started.
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You start alone, with a blank screen and an injunction to write- write about circles. Write about coming back to where you started, or getting back to where you once belonged.

Circles can make your point nicely.
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"Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly. When you're a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?" Your forties, you grow a little pot belly you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery. Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway. Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering "how come the kids don't call?" By your eighties, you've had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand but who you call mama. Any questions?"

-Billy Crystal, as City Slickers' Mitch Robbins, on the circle of life
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New York Knick and part time philosopher Amare Stoudemire asserts that, when encircled by those who oppose you, rise above them.
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Have you ever heard the old school joke about saying something "in your own words"? The joke is, of course, that you can't use your own words. You have to use the same words everybody else does. I've written thousands upon thousands of words, here and elsewhere, and there are times- lots of lots of times- when I can't see the point of it any more. It's not going to make me famous, it's not going to make me rich. There's lots of other things I could be, nay, should be, doing with this time. But I'm not.

I'm using words that you all know- words that we've all been taught- somehow hoping that the alchemy of my brain, my personal collection of neuroses, fears, and wonder, will add to these words a spark of something, a tiny slice of the divine that will light up sympathetic areas of your brain, perhaps, hopefully, inducing a tiny little squirt of dopamine because I have brought you pleasure.

I write because I have always written.
I write because I don't know what else to do.
I write because I have to do something with these thoughts or my brain will explode.
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Johnny Cash and June Carter ask if the Circle will be Unbroken.
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"Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility." -Roger Angell

A baseball is a circle.

"The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." - A. Bartlett Giamatti

So is a baseball season.

***
The thing about circles is, you always wind up the same place that you started.

Brilliant! I loved this challenge and I loved what you did with it. A circle can represent so many things and yet it is also always the end connecting with the beginning. You did an awesome job conveying that!